Quotes from Arthur Golden

My feelings of disgust had been so loud within me, they'd nearly drowned out everything else.

Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.

And suddenly everything around me seemed to grow quiet, as if he were the wind that blew and I were just a cloud carried upon it.

Oh I'm sure you're right, Auntie said. Probably she's just as you say. But she looks to me like a very clever girl, and adaptable; you can see that from the shape of her ears.

I'm not sure this will make sense to you but I felt as though I'd turned around to look in a different direction so that I no longer faced backward toward the past but forward toward the future. And now the question confronting me was this: What would the future be

Waiting patiently doesn't suit you.I can see you have a great deal of water in your personality. Water never waits. It changes shape and flows around things. There's no doubt it's the most versatile of the five elements. It can wash away earth it can put fire it can wear a piece of metal down and sweep it away. And yet, you haven't drawn on those strengths in living your life, Have you?

Here again, I saw life in all its noisy excitement passing me by.

If Mother and Mameha couldn't come to an agreement, I would remain a maid all my life just as surely as a turtle remains a turtle

Some times we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.

And yet if I drew my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.

Finally the homeless eel marked its territory, I suppose, and the Doctor lay heavily upon me, moist with sweat.

Even now that he is gone I have him still, in the richness of my memories. I've lived my life again just telling it to you.

We all know that a winter scene, though it may be covered one day, with even the trees dressed in shawls of snow, will be unrecognizable the following spring.

Sadness was a very heavy thing.

I felt I was standing on a stage many hours after the dance had ended, when the silence lay as heavily upon the empty theater as a blanket of snow.

We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course. If I'd never met Mr. Tanaka, my life would have been a simple stream flowing from our tipsy house to the ocean. Mr. Tanaka changed all that when he sent me out into the world.

Hatsumomo's lovely smille grew... until her lips were as rich and full as drops of blood beading at the edge of a wound

This humble person has been alive long enough to see two generations of children grow up, and knows how rare it is for ordinary birds to give birth to a swan. The swan who goes on living in its parents' tree will die; this is why those who are beautiful and talented bear the burden of finding their own way into the world.

Isn't there one thing I can ask of you that you won't disregard?. . . . You could just reply, Yes, Baron, and be done with it.' Yes, Baron.

No one knows the author of memoir so well like himself.

I wasn't thanking him for the coin, or even for the trouble he'd taken in stopping to help me. I was thanking him for... well, for something I'm not sure I can explain even now. For showing me that something besides cruelty could be found in the world, I suppose.

Every time I caught a glimpse of myself in the glass of a shop, I felt I was someone to be taken seriously; not a girl anymore, but a young woman.

Most nights I lay on my futon I was sick with anxiety, and felt a pit inside myself as big and empty as if the world were nothing more than giant hall empty of people.

My tears simply broke through the fragile wall that had held them, and with a terrible feeling of shame, I laid my head upon the table and let them drain out of me.